A Television Network With a PC at Its Heart

By J.D. BIERSDORFER

Published: August 28, 2003

NECESSITY may be the mother of invention, but it can also play parent to an inspired adaptation, as a college television department that was having trouble communicating with its own students found out. With some creative thinking and a piece of equipment originally intended for something very different, the college has found a way to deliver programming efficiently from its television department all over campus by way of the school's computer network.

Columbia College in Chicago has an enrollment of around 10,000 students and is known for its programs in communications, visual and performing arts, and other media-related subject areas. As with many urban campuses, the school's classrooms, lecture halls and laboratories are scattered throughout a densely packed neighborhood. In Columbia's case, they are spread over several blocks in the South Loop area, from the Theater/Film Annex on South Wabash to the English, radio and journalism departments on East Congress Parkway, with several buildings between along Michigan Avenue.

Universities commonly have closed-circuit TV networks that broadcast announcements, information and student-produced programming around the campus, but Columbia College's sprawl made doing something like that difficult. Although the school got permission several years ago from the city to install underground fiber-optic cable linking three buildings that backed up to a common alley, running more fiber-optic lines under the streets of downtown Chicago would have been prohibitively expensive.

Other options for creating a network were limited. The available spectrum in Chicago is already crowded with television channels, leaving little room for a new broadcast station. The skyscrapers in the Loop blocked microwave links. And an early attempt to use the school's computer network to carry video data directly to all the various buildings yielded unacceptable video image quality and overloaded the network.

As a result, until last year students in Columbia College's television department were able to share their work only by copying it onto videocassettes and distributing them individually to the school's various buildings, where they were played on machines connected to public monitors. ''It was an old-fashioned SneakerNet, schlepping VHS tapes around,'' recalled Michael Niederman, the chairman of the television department at Columbia.

Things began to change in the spring of 2002 when several of the college's staff members, including Mr. Niederman and Dave Mason, the chief engineer in the television department, saw a demonstration of a new Sony Electronics product, the NSP-100 network storage player, at a National Association of Broadcasters trade show. The Sony device was designed to receive, store and play up to 18 hours of compressed video and graphics sent over a standard Internet-protocol network -- without dragging down the entire computer network in the process.

''Someone from the film department said: 'You have to go look at this. It seems like something you guys could use,''' Mr. Niederman said. ''Dave and I went to look at it. And we said this is really something we could use.'' The school bought several Sony NSP-100 boxes, which can each hold 40 gigabytes of data; each unit has a list price of about $1,995.

Although Sony designed the NSP-100 primarily for use in sales booths, video-driven advertising signs and corporate training situations, the Columbia College crew realized that the machines could be plugged into the Ethernet network that already connected campus buildings. ''What they had in mind was more of a kiosk kind of thing, where a program was just running constantly -- just put some content on this little box and let it run somewhere forever,'' Mr. Mason said. ''We're using it more for our transmission purposes. We're changing it all the time.''

Students creating programs for the television network do their production work with standard industry tools like Avid editing consoles and other professional equipment. Once the programs are ready, the shows and video clips can be copied into a standard Windows-based computer and arranged in the desired sequence with Sony software on a playlist, much like one would use for making a mix of MP3 songs.

The video content and playlists are then sent from the PC over the network to the NSP-100 machines and TV monitors placed around the campus. To economize on network bandwidth, the next day's programming is typically sent out from the television department to the network storage players late the night before. Although the machines cannot be used for live television, they do allow for a text ''crawl'' across the bottom portion of the screen, so real-time information can be transmitted from the television department's control room.

''The nice thing about this system is that you don't have to send everything on the playlist to every box,'' said Mr. Mason, explaining that video content relevant to a specific department could be sent just to the NSP-100 located in that department's building. The college has also developed two ''channels'' of programming, one for short announcements and informational displays and another for long-form programming.

''Any urban college or college with infrastructure difficulties, it's an incredible solution,'' Mr. Niederman said of the network storage players and Columbia's inventive way of adapting them. Connecting all the campus's scattered buildings with an easy-to-update video link has drawn an enthusiastic response from students and faculty members alike. Students are showing an increased interest in creating video material, and the television department faculty has added a new course in television programming for the fall semester.

Mr. Niederman said the television department is also working toward the larger goal of having a full-fledged TV station for the college, complete with advertising revenues. ''I don't think we ever would have been so ambitious if this box hadn't landed in our lap,'' he said.

Photo: COVERAGE -- Dave Mason, the chief engineer in the television department at Columbia College in Chicago, in the studio control room. (Photo by Kenneth Dickerman for The New York Times)